This most ignored technique will speed up your learning on YouTube by folds

I love Youtube. I have learned so many things from YouTube ranging from building a website with WordPress, drawing a picture with pencil pastel to even options trading technique.

In fact in my last start up, I built my company's website almost purely from watching videos on how to use Drupal, an open source CMS, to build a powerful contents website. I recalled that at the time when I decided to build the site on my own, I have watched basically more than a hundred YouTube videos of 10 to 20 minutes in length. Many of these videos needed to be watched and re-watched again to let the newly acquired knowledge sinks in.

Whenever I want to learn a new subject, I will go to YouTube to search if there are any relevant videos to acquire a quick initial set of foundational knowledge before before I dive into other more in depth media such as reports and books. One of the things I hate the most is that many of these YouTube videos covers irrelevant information or simply off topic a lot, with excessive lengthy introduction or simply too slow in pace.

Couple of months ago, I was watching YouTube video learning an advance topic on Options Trading at home. My teenage daughter happened to pass by and asked me what I was watching. We started chatting and I told her about how slow some of these videos are. Without thinking, my daughter told me:

You Can Watch YouTube at 1.5 times or 2 times the normal speed.

I am aware of this feature long time ago but have long forgotten about it. So with my daughter's reminder, I tried to watch the long and slow video I was watching in 2 times the speed. Actually 2 times the normal speed is not really that fast and can be listened and comprehend relatively easily in most cases. Now not only that I am able to cut my video watching time in half, I could focus much better too due to the faster speed video is less boring and also stimulates me to concentrate more. I can say that my learning speed has improved at least 2 times in most cases.

So now, whenever I watch some rather long and boring (but with important contents) in YouTube, I just change the speed to 1.5 or 2 times the normal speed. I will slow down to normal speed for parts of the video which deserve to watch in slower speed the second time or third time.